Okot p'Bitek

Okot p'Bitek (7 June 1931 – 20 July 1982) was a Ugandan poet, who achieved wide international recognition for Song of Lawino, a long poem dealing with the tribulations of a rural African wife whose husband has taken up urban life and wishes everything to be westernised. Song of Lawino was originally written in the Acholi language, and self-translated to English, and published in 1966. It was a breakthrough work, creating an audience amongst anglophone Africans for direct, topical poetry in English; and incorporating traditional attitudes and thinking in an accessible yet faithful literary vehicle. It was followed by the pendant Song of Ocol (1970), the husband's reply.

The East African Song School or Okot School poetry is now an academic identification of the work following his direction, also popularly called "comic singing": a forceful type of dramatic verse monologue rooted in traditional song and phraseology.

Okot p'Bitek was born in Gulu, in the North Uganda grasslands. His father Jebedayo Opi was a schoolteacher, his mother Lacwaa Cerina was a traditional singer. His background was Acholi, and he wrote first in Lwo, one of the Western Nilotic languages.

He was educated at Gulu High School, then King's College, Budo, and later at universities in the United Kingdom. At school he was noted as a singer, dancer, drummer and athlete; he composed and directed an opera while at college.

He travelled abroad first as a player with the Ugandan national football team, in 1958. At this point he gave up on football as a possible career, staying on in Britain; he studied education at the University of Bristol, and then law at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. He then took a B.Litt. degree in social anthropology at the University of Oxford, with a 1963 dissertation on Acholi and Lango traditional cultures.

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